Chapter 4 - Reverence at the Seashore: Seashore Natural History, Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857), and Margaret Gatty’s Parables from Nature (1855)

Summary

Chapter 4 focuses on Charles Kingsley and Margaret Gatty, two mid-Victorian figures who wrote in multiple genres, including novels, parables, and seashore natural histories. The chapter centers on Kingsley’s novel of English provincial realism Two Years Ago (1857) and Gatty’s Parables of Nature (1855-71), both of which offer a clear discursive bridge between natural history and imaginative fictions at mid-century. Two Years Ago is the lost link between the more canonical provincial realism of Jane Austen’s Emma and those of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. The chapter considers the novel alongside Kingsley’s seashore natural history Glaucus: The Wonders of the Shore (1855). The chapter analyzes a section of Gatty’s Parables from Nature (in which a zoophyte, a seaweed, and a bookworm converse) alongside her British Sea-Weeds (1863). These texts explore the thematic and formal connections between reverent natural history and fiction at mid-century.